A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realise you never needed it in the first place. You realise that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself. . .

Derrick Jenson

I gave up hope a week or so ago and took positive action. I stopped training completely.

It’s been a frustrating season. I had motivation like I’ve not experienced for many many years now but early on pain in my left foot had me really worried about the state of my tendon repair. I held back and got it seen to.  As I started back after Ironman South Africa I did a open water rescue course and tweaked my shoulder – didn’t really think anything of it at the time. It gave me a good excuse to avoid the fly sets I was being set.

This was soon followed with problems in my heel which restricted my running at Wimbleball and was painful enough afterwards to see Helen at 10-Point to get treatment. My mechanical at IMUK meant I never got to test it and post that race with motivation to head to Copenhagen at a high I managed to put my back out – I could hardly walk. My goals quickly went from great race at Copenhagen an Wales to get Kona slots all the way down to now of get round 70.3 Worlds and at best get to the run at Wales.

The back meant I could only ride on the turbo, swimming made it really bad. After a few sessions with Helen we finally felt we’d got to the bottom of it and all these injuries were related. We could never figure out the pain in the heel but the most likely reason is referred pain from a prolapsed disc. In the last week this seems to have been proven right as the heel pain has gone as I’ve worked on my lower back. To slowly get on top of this though it’s meant I’ve completely stopped all training. The image below shows SBR volume and total hours:

This makes it feel odd heading to a World Championships this weekend. Finally I have to practise what I preach. A couple of weeks a go though I was aerobically very fit I had zero fitness: my fitness to complete a Triathlon was zero – I would not be able to complete. So the best training I could do to gain race fitness was to stop all training and try and sort out this back. Have I ? Not sure, at the moment when my back feels great I have pain in my heel and when my back feels terrible I have zero pain in my heel.

Tomorrow I pack my bike. Thursday I see Helen. Friday I travel. I may do a practise swim on Saturday but other than that nothing till race day.

Predictions … oh go on then:

Swim: 0:27
T1: 0:03
Bike: 2:59
T2: 0:03
Run: 2:00
TOTAL: 5:32

Optimistic… I’ll be happy to get round.